With the advancement, ease of use, and decline of prices for digital cameras, the number of digital photographs and images throughout the world has increased substantially. Very often, the digital photographs and images are not completely satisfactory to the persons taking or viewing them. Indeed, many computer aided techniques exist to manipulate, retouch, or otherwise edit digital photographs and images.
Often the grouping of pixels that are spatially contiguous and have similar information within them can assist in the computer aided techniques, namely segmentation of the image. Examples of this grouping, each of which is hereby incorporated by reference herein in its entirety, can be found in: “Normalized Cuts and Image Segmentation,” J. Shi, J. Malik, IEEE Trans. On Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol. 22, No. 8, pp 888-905, August 2000; “Learning a Classification Model for Segmentation,” X. Ren, J. Malik, ICCV 2003, Vol. 1, pp 10-17; and, “Clustering Appearance and Shape by Learning Jigsaws,” A. Kannan, J. Winn, C. Rother, NIPS 2006, each of which is hereby incorporated by reference herein. An example of an application attempting to utilize this principle can be found in a product called FluidMask, created by the company Vertus.
The problem with the current applications which utilize grouping principles is the high level of sophistication necessary to truly gain the benefit from the principle. Generally, the user is required to tweak many parameters within a period of time to obtain sought after results. It is difficult for the user to select optimal parameters for the principle because of the difficulty of truly understanding how all the parameters will affect the grouping of pixels and the resulting grouping is highly dependent on the details found in any given image. As should be evident, there is an unfulfilled need for systems and methods which will increase the ease with which a user can utilize the grouping principle as well as the effectiveness of the grouping principle during image processing.
It should be noted that the figures are not drawn to scale and that elements of similar structures or functions are generally represented by like reference numerals for illustrative purposes throughout the figures. It also should be noted that the figures are only intended to facilitate the description of the preferred embodiments of the present disclosure. The figures do not illustrate every aspect of the disclosed embodiments and do not limit the scope of the disclosure.